NEW YORK (AP) — Steven Spielberg and George Clooney go way back in show business. In fact, it was Spielberg who gave Clooney his big break on the TV show “ER,” the actor recalls.

But the two Hollywood heavyweights came together Thursday evening for a different reason: Spielberg was honoring Clooney for his humanitarian work around the globe, especially in the Darfur region of Sudan.

At a glittery fundraising gala in the vast “Whale Room” at New York’s Museum of Natural History, the director and his USC Shoah Foundation presented Clooney with its Ambassador for Humanity Award. Also on hand to praise Clooney were his co-star in the new movie “Gravity,” Sandra Bullock, and Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show.”

“George is the best kind of humanitarian,” Spielberg said. “The humble humanitarian.” The director called Clooney “an unparalleled example of action over apathy.”

Clooney told the crowd of donors that “Our job is to make it hard for the bad guys to do what they’re doing, and for the good guys to ignore it.”

The actor also praised Spielberg for his foundation’s work in creating and preserving video testimonies of Holocaust victims for future generations to learn from.

“We have to be able to keep a record of what the powerful can do to the powerless,” Clooney said.

The gala marked the 20th anniversary of Spielberg’s Holocaust movie “Schindler’s List,” a film that won the director an Oscar and, Spielberg says, gave him the idea to start a foundation that would record interviews with Holocaust survivors. To date, the foundation, founded in 1994 and based since 2006 at the University of Southern California, has collected nearly 52,000 eyewitness testimonies on video, in what it calls the largest digital collection of its kind in the world.

In an interview before the gala, Spielberg explained that a new, broader phase of the foundation’s work, begun recently, involves collecting video testimonies from survivors of genocide in places like Rwanda, Cambodia, and Armenia. “The origins of hatred haven’t gone away,” the director said. The foundation has already begun its work with testimony from Rwanda. The other countries will follow.